I am writing at my desk, shod today in old passementerie-trimmed gray velvet Manolo pumps, with my back supported by a Manolo cushion, a long-ago Christmas gift from the designer. Three steps away is a closet brimming with several hundred pair of Manolos, dating back a quarter of a century. In the front hall, Manolo’s scented candles (also presents from the designer) are burning, and a Manolo notepad, a holiday token of more recent vintage, sits next to the phone. I was married in Manolos, gave birth with a pair of Manolos stashed in the maternity-ward locker, and I expect I’ll be buried in Manolos, or maybe the whole extravagant accumulation of them will be buried with me, à la égyptienne. I am, in short, a three-decade devotee of the man and his shoes, a habit that has invited, in turns, ridicule (for wearing mules in an era of sneakers), fury (for the money squandered on this passion), and, finally, awe (for possessing possibly the most comprehensive collection of Manolos outside the master’s own archives). Manolo, is it time to name a shoe after me?

Manolo Blahnik, his mother said, was born old, but somehow he’s managed to preserve his childhood self into his adult life. The first shoes he ever made, as a boy in the Canary Islands, were muslin-and-ribbon slippers for his pet dog, who’d lie on his back and raise his paws while the young master fastened their pink bows—still a signature Manolo embellishment.

Manolo’s taste is pitched so high and fine, sometimes words elude him, and he expresses himself by squeals, usually of delight. His ideas are often best conveyed via drawings—Platonic ideals of shoes. A single, allusive sketch of a shoe can suggest a whole narrative of murder, passion, or seduction. Everything Manolo does—dressing, decorating, designing—is filtered through a sensibility so exquisite that the outcome invariably falls on the outer limits of perfection. Or, as Manolo would say, “beyond!” So full of exuberant life were his rococo creations for the film Marie Antoinette, they nearly upstaged the actors. Perpetually animated, Manolo in conversation quivers with excitement; his creations likewise burst with an élan vital. Fringes shimmy, flowers tremble, bows bristle, buckles twinkle.

If Manolo has an Achilles’ heel, it is his sweet tooth, and so, consequently, the shoes are confectionary—high-glucose bonbons for the foot. A lover of opera (the more histrionically tortured the diva the better), Manolo naturally bestows upon his shoes their own peculiar music—the rhythmic staccato of stilettos striking parquet, the dry rattle of pearls swinging from the vamps of mules, the breezy rustle of raffia.

Frequently in pain—his back chronically aches him—Manolo wouldn’t dream of inflicting such an unpleasant sensation on a woman. The shoes are engineered anatomically, taking into account the filigree bones, delicate muscles, and fragile sinews of the foot. Manolo understands intimately their placement, their patterns, their movements.
His tapering, graceful silhouettes attenuate an instep, slim an ankle, elongate a calf, refine the full head-to-toe line of a woman’s physique. They buoy up the whole woman to the point of levitation, lifting her in body and spirit. Innately courtly and decent, Manolo cannot make vulgar, coarse, or clumsy shoes. Not for him are feet of clay.
A polyglot, Manolo speaks six languages fluently and sometimes simultaneously. His references ricochet alarmingly from Paulina Borghese to Tina Chow, from Fellini to Sandra Dee, from Taormina to tweeds, Byzantium to botany. Animal, vegetable, and mineral; history and culture; nature and artifice—all are compressed into every design. A girl in Manolos becomes a universal heroine.

A hothouse hybrid—he is all at once Czech, Spanish, African, and British—Manolo conjures up chimeras. His drawings, like those in a medieval bestiary, are bizarre, exotic, perverse, and emblematic—gorgeous mutations born of a cross-pollinated imagination.
Manolo is forever faithful to himself—even his sleek, symmetrical manner of brushing back his hair is unchanging—and so his design aesthetic is constant. He resists, for example, platforms or inordinate toe cleavage. Though he may have formulated today’s wide-ranging shoe taxonomy—from Mary Janes to gladiators—he knows intuitively just how far to go too far. A perfect foot—arch high, second toe longer than the first—was created first by God, and then by Praxiteles. But the perfect shoe is always by Manolo.